Project Natal Unveiled

1st June 2009 - Posted by Ice Mario

What is Project Natal?

It's a revolutionary technology that allows you to play games without a controller. In fact, your whole body becomes the controller. It combines an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor running proprietary software all in one device. It opens up the possibilities of tracking full 3D body movement, voice and facial recognition.

In one of the tech demos on display during the Microsoft Press Conference was a 3D breakout kind of game with the player moving their arms and legs to return the balls, which was reflected by the on-sceen character.

Other demos shown were a painting game where your character stands before a big canvas. Using throwing motions you could make the onscreen character throw buckets of paint onto the canvas. The voice recognition came into play here, with the artist saying the colour of the paint that he wanted. This all seemed a bit limited and the last bit made up for it. Going into Pose mode, the canvas would should the silhoutte of the real player. He wanted to make an elephant to go on his 'wonderful' landscape. He was joined by another person and together they made the shape of the elephant, then again using the voice recongition to make it take the picture. He was then free to colour the silhoutte how he wanted and place it onto his previous landscape. I wonder how many people it takes to make a penis.

They even welcomed movie director Steven Spielberg on stage who praised the technology, explaining that it was needed to get non-gamers into games. "The only way to bring interactive entertainment to everybody is to make the technology invisible," he said.

Because it's an add on peripheral it will work with all Xbox 360's already out there.